Tell Me Everything. Sarah Salway
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never stopped moving. He tapped his fingers on his jeans as if he was playing the piano, his feet twitched up and down too in a rhythm I tried to catch. He was wearing no socks. It was one of the first things I noticed about him.
A man passed us as we sat there. ‘Nice day,’ he said, or something like that, and I smiled back. Tim’s feet stayed still then, I noticed. His ankles were white and bony above his unlaced trainers. A vein snaked its way round the bump like a twisting river of blood.
‘You’re not saying you picked someone up in the park!’
I came back to Miranda’s salon with a start.
‘Do you not know how dangerous that is? Do you not know that, Molly? There was this woman in one of my magazines who was captured by a man she met in the park. He kept her like a dog in a flat nearby, let her out for exercise and she was so frightened that she always came back to him when he called. Can you not imagine that?’ When Miranda got excited a Scottish under-current always came out, not just in the accent but in the sentence order too. The negativity of her Caledonian grammar made me more defensive than I knew I should have been.
‘I can look after myself,’ I said.
Miranda pulled a piece of my hair especially tight, ignoring my gasp. ‘Leave that chair alone,’ she said too, and I let go of it, but not before spinning it once more round for luck.
‘I was just sitting on the Seize the Day bench reading,’ I said. ‘He came to sit there too. Asked if I had any idea who Jessica was.’
‘Not local then.’
I shook my head. That had been one of the first things I’d thought too. All the locals knew about Jessica Carter. She was a teenage girl who had killed herself four years ago. It was just before she took her A levels and when she died, it started a big campaign about adolescent pressure at school and academic achievements and how girls were supposed to look like models as well as everything else.
Because that’s what she wrote in her suicide note: Maybe if I was prettier, then none of this would have mattered.
No one but me seemed to think it was funny how the newspapers used the story as an excuse to print photographs of Jessica looking pretty alongside the articles about how dangerous it was to worry so much about appearance. My mother had told me not to always be so difficult, but it was true. There were lots of photographs, not just of Jessica but of film stars, supermodels, musicians. Pages and pages of beautiful women.
‘Don’t go all dreamy on me, Molly,’ Miranda said. ‘You were telling me about the man.’
‘He’s different,’ I said. ‘Hard to explain.’
‘Could I meet him?’
‘I’ll ask but he’s not shy exactly. More private.’
She shrugged and twisted my chair so I was sitting straight, facing the mirror with her standing behind me. I normally liked seeing us like that, one on top of the other like two twists in one of those fancy bread sticks they sell in the Italian deli on the corner but there was something strange about our reflections tonight.
‘I thought we might go for a flick-out at the end of your hair next time,’ she said. ‘It’ll bring out the beautiful texture of your skin. You’ve been blessed with your skin. It makes me mad with jealousy.’
I put my hand up to my neck in the mirror, let my finger and thumb stretch across so I could be strangling myself, but then raised my hand up so it was just cupping my chin. Softly. ‘But your neck. . . ’ I said. Behind me, Miranda lifted her face up in the mirror to expose the arch of her neck.
I was pleased Tim was late for our date that night.
It gave me more time with Jessica.
‘Jessica,’ I told her in my head, tracing the carved letters on the rough wood of the bench with my fingertips as if I was playing the piano. S.E.I.Z.E. T.H.E. D.A.Y. There’d been a collection for the bench at school, but it was the headmaster who had chosen the words. He’d wanted it to be a lesson to spur the rest of us into a new joy of life, but it hadn’t worked. Rather than the inspiration he’d hoped for, the Seize the Day bench had become a symbol for everything that could go wrong. I wondered whether that was why most people shied away from it. Most people, that is, apart from Tim and me. ‘This is how I met him. . . ’
And, although it all happened on her bench and she must have been aware of us, I told her everything Tim had said that first time I met him, and how when Tim asked whether we could meet again, I told him this bench could be our regular spot. ‘Maybe tomorrow. I’m often here. She was a friend,’ I’d lied to him.
After the first ripples of shock at Jessica’s death had gone round the school, there was a curious quietness everywhere for weeks. Every excuse for not being happy was suddenly flawed.
‘Maybe if I was prettier. . . ’ But if you were looking for one word to describe Jessica, it would have been pretty.
‘Maybe if I had more money. . . ’ But Jessica’s family took two holidays a year. Once, for her fourteenth birthday, they took the whole class to a theme park for her party. Jessica got all her clothes in London, not the local Topshop like the rest of us. She wasn’t the sort of girl who needed a Saturday job.
‘Maybe if I was cleverer. . . ’ But Jessica was a top A student.
But now, when no one else but me seemed to bother to visit the bench any more, things seemed more equal. ‘We could have been friends,’ I told Jessica. ‘I used to be so unhappy as well.’ D.A.Y. My index finger traced the scars in the wood made by the letters.
So perhaps that was why, even before Tim arrived, I was feeling as if I might have a bit of potential too. I put my face down and brushed my hair back over my shoulder with the side of my hand like Jessica used to do. After Jessica died, I used to do it at home so often that my father banned hair-touching at table. I couldn’t have risked it at school either. It was definitely an in-crowd gesture, and might have drawn attention to me in a way my father wouldn’t have liked.
I must have been too busy doing the hair thing to hear Tim come. When I looked up, he was already sitting down on the other end of the bench, his head between his knees.
‘Are you OK?’ I asked.
‘Quick,’ he said. ‘Put your head down too. NOW!’
I copied him.
‘Don’t look up,’ he warned. ‘Shut your eyes if possible.’
I couldn’t. I looked at the ground instead. There were bits of chewing gum stuck under the bench. Cigarette butts, even a beer bottle. I made up my mind to tidy up sometime. For Jessica’s sake.
‘Wha. . . ’
‘Be quiet,’ Tim said. He put his arm round my shoulders to draw me closer to him. I could feel the heat of his body through his jumper. The outline of his fingers across my back burnt into me like infrared. He smelt of fabric conditioner and warm apples. I’d never been so close to a boy before. I tried hard to stop my body from tensing up, to relax more and enjoy the embrace.
‘We’re going to have to make a run for it,’ Tim said. He stood up and held out his hand, and I took it, clutching at his fingers as he pulled me into the bushes that lined the edge of the park. Just when I was thinking I couldn’t run any more, he stopped and we hid behind a tree for him to keep a watch out. He pulled the sleeves of his jumper down to cover my hands, holding on to my wrists so tightly. I did the same to him. It was as if we were grafting ourselves on to each other.
‘I know who it is,’ I said. ‘It’s my father. He’s found me.’
Tim hushed me. ‘It’s not,’ he replied. ‘I’ll keep you safe.’
I didn’t ask how he could be so certain. My heart was beating hard against his chest